Larry: Interesting comments, and to be honest I never really put much thought into how to approach combat like that. Really, I was just there for the story. Perhaps on my next playthrough I'll give it a go, now that I've seen how it ends. Cheers.

Cheers! Combat in ME3 is, I think, still unnecessarily grindy for story gamers who just want to get on with the narrative. I can get on board with you that Bioware ought to have fundamentally changed the combat structure for "Narrative" games rather than reduce numbers to where the combat is still the same, but grindy.

So you're all familiar with the multiplayer weapons they added to single player (still not sure why they didn't convert ALL of the multiplayer weapons to single player but whatever). Here's my take on the new ones:

Blood Pack Punisher - Looks a little rough for N7, with paint and tape and stuff on it. In other words, it looks like the kind of thing a Blood Pack would carry. Looks aside, it's a pretty standard high-recoil fully-automatic SMG. Every second or so it fires an additional armor-piercing shot, which produces additional recoil. The two different rates or recoil make it difficult to control, but it does offer armor-piercing on an SMG without a mod, which is good because the armor-piercing SMG mod is multiplayer-only.

Adas Anti-Synthetic Rifle - Looks like an assault rifle version of the Reegar Carbine, all curves and rails. It fires an energy-based shot which sticks to a target for a moment before exploding. The damage seems kind of low in the few minutes I played around with it.

I really wish they'd homogenize the single player and multiplayer content.

Mixing Good Whisky with Bad Rum, in the spiritual realm of Frarkin Frogohs Frapulisim

"mysterious being rumored to be powerful enough to destroy a reaper". Really? Said being better NOT be able to destroy a reaper, if they want the already incoherent ending to have any semblance of coherence left...

In reality: Cheshire in the UK. In game: Be vewy, vewy qwiet. I'm hunting wobots.

kexx wrote:

"mysterious being rumored to be powerful enough to destroy a reaper". Really? Said being better NOT be able to destroy a reaper, if they want the already incoherent ending to have any semblance of coherence left...

That ship may have left space dock.

I bet the "mysterious being rumored to be powerful enough to destroy a reaper" is just the hook to to get Shepard down there. It can't really come to anything without having the whole game branch from that point on.

"mysterious being rumored to be powerful enough to destroy a reaper". Really? Said being better NOT be able to destroy a reaper, if they want the already incoherent ending to have any semblance of coherence left...

Well, it might be able to destroy ONE reaper, not necessarily several of them at once, which in ME3 terms means it just counts as a good bit of war assets, not actually changing the ending in any way.

DLC spoilers I read somewhere said that:

Spoiler:

Leviathan is the first reaper, made from the race of intelligent giant squids that actually created the reapers in the first place. I think there's a chance the ending might actually make more sense after this DLC. Which means they probably should have included the content in the first place.

Doh! Slightly bad timing, I just finished a fresh play through of ME3 not long ago (which I have to say, with the updated ending in place, has gone right back on to my top ten games of the year list - with all that ending hubbub I'd forgotten just how freakin' great a lot of the stuff that happens during that game is).

oh well...downloading now. Probably wont get a chance to try it out until tomorrow though.

I don't know what the scientific definition of a sh*tload is, but that was a sh*tload of harvesters.

EDIT:

Finished the DLC.

The reviews are about right. It's not as good as Lair of the Shadow Broker, both in rewards and the missions themselves. But it's definitely on par with From Ashes, especially from a lore perspective. Unlike From Ashes, it doesn't change the storyline in any meaningful way, but it does add some context to the Reapers.

I will say this, though: I'm not sure how well everything scales between difficulties and when you play it in the campaign(I played it on Insanity with a max level adept shep after the mission where Banshees were introduced), so I may be wrong here. But if you're on your first playthrough(even with a fully imported Shep), save the DLC until the late game. Every single Reaper unit is thrown at you, including Ravagers, Brutes, and Banshees, so you need to be prepared for them. I didn't find it exceptionally difficult, but so far on the Insanity playthrough, nothing's been difficult for Commander Shepard, the walking Biotic explosion.

clockworkhouse wrote:

Buncha fun haters around here...

dimmerswitch wrote:

When you really get down to it, isn't a hearse really just an unsuccessful ambulance?

Now I have a Mass Effect shaped hole in my gaming itinerary, and I'm craving something similar. Can anyone recommend a story driven RPG that can scratch the same itch? Preferably scifi but fantasy will do, too. I've already played both Dragon Age games (and for what it's worth, though I enjoyed them, neither had the same resonance with me). Any suggestions?

Are you on the PC or X-box? It's kind of hard to find a game with a similar epic scale, but if you're on the PC and are down with DnD fiddliness, I'd say the Neverwinter Ninghts 2 expansion The Mask of The Betrayer is one of the finest rpg stories ever, and the locations you visit are more imaginative than the cod-medieval settings of most fantasy rpgs.

Has anyone figured out how to get past being stuck at the 'press any key' screen? Google is no help, just finding a lot of people with the same problem with DA2 (or was it DA1, meh). I really thought they would have patched this by now. Sigh.

I'm afraid I don't know how to help you, ibdoomed. Maybe plug in another keyboard? Give it some more keys to "any?"

I liked Leviathan quite a bit, especially the little trophy I got to bring back to the Normandy. I have mixed feelings about the diving scene. The load screens and shattering light are very well done, but other than that it's very short and doesn't really give an appropriate sense of depth. I wanted cracking glass and buckling metal, dammit.

Just finished Leviathan and I think it was pretty good. I like that they didn't skimp on the voice acting this time around (there's VO from your entire crew) but the story doesn't get interesting until you're close to the end. The character driven stuff is always more interesting to me and this is obviously not that.

Question about a minor thing:

Spoiler:

The 2nd time visit the office / lab, you search a requisitions locker that has like five different interaction points. I got two of them then the rest disappeared and EDI seemed to imply I should look there again but I couldn't. I never narrowed down the star map that second time so I'm wandering if anyone else managed to.

Just finished Leviathan and I think it was pretty good. I like that they didn't skimp on the voice acting this time around (there's VO from your entire crew) but the story doesn't get interesting until you're close to the end. The character driven stuff is always more interesting to me and this is obviously not that.

Question about a minor thing:

Spoiler:

The 2nd time visit the office / lab, you search a requisitions locker that has like five different interaction points. I got two of them then the rest disappeared and EDI seemed to imply I should look there again but I couldn't. I never narrowed down the star map that second time so I'm wandering if anyone else managed to.

Spoiler:

I selected a piece of equipment that was left behind, then a piece that was missing. The rest of the search markers vanished but I did get the option to narrow my search to planets that would require diving gear. Add the Icarus spec filter to that and it narrowed it down to a single cluster (though I still had to check three separate systems within that cluster).

Does Ann die if you do all the renegade interrupts? After finishing the last mission I talked to everyone on the ship and something James said seemed to imply that she did. Also, I liked the fact that there was no boss fight in this DLC.

That was pretty good - though it would probably work better as part of a fresh playthrough rather than after finishing the game.

Spoiler:

It's especially useful in that it foreshadows the ending and fleshes out the motivations/origins of you-know-who a bit more, making it feel a lot less like something they just pulled out of there backside at the last minute.

Vaguely annoying though that another lore-heavy piece of content that fleshes out the main storyline is paid for DLC and not part of the main game.

Not that I've a problem with paid-for extra side content...just so long as it IS "side" content. Or something that expands the story BEYOND the end of the game, although I doubt that would happen.

I looked up some reviews for this and they seem mixed. I wonder how much that is due to the general lack of excitement for the universe after all that happened. Had this been DLC for ME2 I bet it would be reviewing better.

Patrick Weekes of Bioware has said that any future DLC depends on how Leviathan does. I guess we're at the point of where their initial (and then revised, due to EC) plans end for stuff they had the studio do following on from the game release, and now they need to decide how quickly they're moving on.

I wonder if that affects how much pre-production their next game gets, whether EA thinks the amount of time Bioware spends (used to?) on world building pays off. I'm thinking of Dragon Age's long development time here too. With SWTOR as well, 'old/original Bioware' could be at a minor turning point now.

Patrick Weekes of Bioware has said that any future DLC depends on how Leviathan does. I guess we're at the point of where their initial (and then revised, due to EC) plans end for stuff they had the studio do following on from the game release, and now they need to decide how quickly they're moving on.

I think Weekes later said that there will be for sure more single player DLC. I sure hope so! I for one loved the extra story exploration in Leviathan.